


Three-syllabled and starry as the smile

by lbmisscharlie



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Bathroom Sex, F/M, Facial Hair, Facial Shaving, First Time, M/M, Multi, Straight Razors, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-06
Updated: 2014-01-06
Packaged: 2018-01-07 18:42:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1123101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lbmisscharlie/pseuds/lbmisscharlie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It hardly seems fair, that John would shave his moustache off for Sherlock and Sherlock not be there.</p>
<p>(Very mild spoilers for some dialogue from <i>The Empty Hearse<i>.)</i></i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Three-syllabled and starry as the smile

**Author's Note:**

> Before series 3, I wrote an [angsty infidelity fic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/966221) about John asking Sherlock to shave his moustache, and I've felt a little bad about how callously I treated Mary ever since. Well, consider this my apology, as well as my expression of undying affection for Amanda Abbington's Mary as we've seen her so far.
> 
> As ever, endless thanks to [peninsulam](http://archiveofourown.org/users/peninsulam/pseuds/peninsulam) for her continual encouragement and super-speedy beta work.
> 
> Title is from Dylan Thomas's ["In the beginning"](http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/dylan-thomas/in-the-beginning/).

John steps out of the bathroom, shaving crème spread over his cheeks and – thank the lord – above his lip for the first time in six months. Mary hugs her knees. “What are you doing?”

Narrowing his eyes, John holds up his hands. “Just having a wash.”

“You’re shaving it off!” Mary can’t keep the glee from her voice; John sighs and steps back into the bathroom. “I can’t believe you’re shaving it off. Six months of bristly kisses for _me_ , but the moment His Nibs wants to –”

“I do not shave for Sherlock Holmes,” John says. The indignation in his voice echoes over the tiles.

Mary snorts. “You should put that on a tee-shirt. But really; it’s hardly fair.” She hears John pause, kiss his teeth. “He should at least be there when you shave it off, don’t you think?” Jumping up, she crawls over the bed to reach her phone, which had tumbled between the pillows sometime between hitting the snooze button the fifth and sixth times. 

“That’s ridiculous,” John says, leaning back through the door. He hasn’t started shaving yet, though.

“Wash that off.”

“What?”

“Wash that off,” Mary insists, sending a text. “We're going to Baker Street.”

++

Sherlock’s eyes flick over Mary carelessly when they step into the sitting room of 221b, instead examining John, roving over his body with hungry attention. John stands patiently, and though his hand tenses he keeps it at his side, unclenched. His face changes, when Sherlock looks at him; his jaw tightens, he blinks less. It couldn’t have always been that way; she remembers the soft, sly grin John used to get when talking about Sherlock, can see its ghost in the flicker of John’s eyes when Sherlock looks away.

“Changed you mind about shaving it off? Shame; I thought showing you that everyone hated it would convince you.” Sherlock wears a dressing gown, unbelted, over his trousers and shirt. His feet are bare and pale. His hand fidgets with the edge of the dressing gown; Mary’s throat aches.

John swallows; Mary can hear it, the heavy _snick_ of his throat. “How’d you know he was thinking of it?” Mary asks, to chase out the dark silence. 

Blinking, Sherlock turns his head to look at her, like dragging his eyes away. “Bit of shaving crème still just –” He gestures to his jawline. “Usually the sign of an inattentive wife.” Beside her, John stiffens.

“Not quite,” Mary says, touching John’s forearm quickly. “I thought you should have the honour of being present.”

“What?”

“He wants to shave it for you, so you should be there. Here.”

“I don’t want to –” Mary raises both eyebrows at John, who exhales sharply through his nose and looks away. “Listen, can we just – just get it done with?”

“So eager,” Mary says drily; Sherlock snorts then immediately composes his face again. Mary bites back a grin. “Well then, where’s the bathroom in this place?”

“This way,” John and Sherlock say at once, both stepping toward the kitchen. Sherlock stops, tilting his chin down to let John and Mary go first. John flexes his hand before swallowing and guiding Mary with a hand to her lower back.

The bathroom is small. Frankly, too small for two grown men to share, never mind three people all at once. John crowds against the sink to let Mary by; she flips the toilet lid down to perch there. Sherlock hovers in the doorway. From his pocket, John pulls his disposable razor.

Sherlock looks at it – stares at it, really – then says, shortly: “No.”

“Why do you think I brought him here?” Mary says. Sherlock glances at her, brow furrowed. “Had to save him from himself. Surely you –” she gestures him up and down: his trousers with their still-sharp crease, his silk dressing gown – “have some ridiculously old-fashioned straight razor hidden somewhere.”

“There’s nothing ridiculous about a proper shave,” Sherlock says, with a sniff, and John coughs a laugh.

“You sound like Mycroft,” he says, and by the glare Sherlock gives him Mary wonders if she might not pull this off after all. Instead of leaving, though, Sherlock reaches across John to the cabinet; John doesn’t move, though Mary can see him stiffen against a flinch. She rubs the back of her knuckles against his thigh, and he brushes her hand, briefly, in acknowledgment, but his shoulders stay tight. 

From the cabinet, Sherlock pulls a small leather case, perching it on the corner of the sink and cracking it open. His fingers leave smudged prints in the film of dust across the lid, but when he flicks the razor open it gleams. He examines the edge, holding it up, and the light shines off it to play across his cheekbones; in his attention, his mouth has dropped open slightly, lips reddened and damp and – oh. Mary hadn’t expected to feel quite so – hadn’t thought to expect that hungry heat, deep in her belly, at Sherlock’s long-fingered, delicate grip on the handle, at his grey eyes narrowed and canny. When he places the blade, gently, on the edge of the sink she lets out her breath; neither man notices the noise.

Next from the case comes a small, battered tin of shaving soap and a gleaming, neatly-bristled brush.

“No,” John says, breaking the soft sounds of Sherlock’s hands assembling his tools. “I’m not bloody – the spray stuff is fine.” Sherlock scoffs and doesn’t pause in wetting the brush, lathering the soap. John looks to Mary; she shrugs. 

“Might as well do it right,” she says.

He narrows his eyes and says, “Traitor.”

Without a word, Sherlock presents the brush, its bristles flecked with pale foam; he holds it up, as though for John to take, and Mary, all in a rush, says, “Wait.” John’s eyes drag to her one long moment later as she stands. “One last kiss,” she says. “Just to remember it.” She cups his cheek and presses her thumb over the moustache. She hadn’t ever hated it, but she’s not sorry to see it go. She can only hope that some of the etched lines around John’s eyes, the worried set of his mouth, the too-thin planes of his cheeks will depart with it.

Leaning in, she presses her lips against his, the now-familiar tickle against her skin, then steps closer, moving one hand to his hip, holding – gripping – and sliding the other to caress his neck. She can feel his swallow against her thumb, and only then does she step back. “Good,” she says, feeling her voice a little too raw. He blinks his eyes open at her, wide, and she nods, willing his trust. “Sherlock,” she says, still looking at John, “would you like to have a go?”

John’s eyes flicker wider, and she strokes her fingers over the back of his neck; Sherlock’s swallow sounds too loud in the small room. “Before it’s gone,” she says, as though that were unassailable logic. When she finally looks around John to Sherlock, behind him, it’s to see his jaw, working, and his eyes staring tight at her hand on the back of John’s neck. “It’s okay,” she says, very gently, “it is.” She slides her hand from John’s neck to his shoulder, pressing a little to turn him; he shakes his head, starts to speak, and she pauses. “It really is, John, really,” she says, and feels the depth of the breath he takes as it shudders through his body.

He turns the rest of the way on his own, though Mary leaves her hand on his shoulder. He tilts his chin up, like he never needs to with her; she can only just see the edge of Sherlock’s jaw and his forehead, and both are concerned. John, though, bravest and best man she’s ever known, leans in enough, just enough, for their mouths to nearly touch. She thinks she can nearly feel the breath shared between them in the long, heady moment captured between their too-still lips before Sherlock rocks forward, tips really, and brings them together.

All at once John’s shoulders go slack under her hand. The kiss is hushed, cautious; they touch nowhere but their lips, John’s hands still at his sides. 

Sherlock pulls away first. His hand comes down heavily on the edge of the sink, just catching his shaving case and sending it clattering to the floor. The sound shatters the air; John takes a great, heaving breath and laughs, raw and hoarse. Mary rubs her hand across the nape of his neck, thumbing over his vertebrae, and he arches into her hand a bit. 

“Well then,” Sherlock says, voice more steady than his hand, which holds up the brush once more, its foamed bristles quivering. 

“You’d better still those hands,” John says, his voice so heated and low that Mary feels it, in her chest, in her cunt. “If you’re going to be of any use.” Sherlock’s question must be in his gaze, hidden from Mary, for John laughs again and says, “I don’t know how to use a bloody straight razor, you great toff.”

Mary’s fairly certain that’s a lie, but Sherlock’s hand goes startlingly still at John’s words, like he’s drawn himself up, tightened his nerves and brought his muscles in taut; she had never really understood what John meant when he said Sherlock could shift to a new person in a moment, but she can see it, now, in his unconscious movements. As he becomes something of the man she’d read in John’s words.

Shifting, Mary leans back against the tank of the toilet; here, she can see around the curve of John’s jaw to where Sherlock lifts his hand, placing two fingers lightly under John’s chin, and the way John’s shoulders lift at his deep breath. The porcelain of the tank is cold through her blouse. She lifts her feet to tuck them on the edge of the lid, heels to her thighs, and hugs her knees tight to her chest, feeling the warmth of her body spread. The hem of her skirt she tucks into the sweat-slick creases of her knees to keep it in place, but the humid air of the bathroom skates across her thighs, across the dampness of her knickers. She squeezes her thighs together, biting down on the soft flesh of her lower lip.

Sherlock lathers John’s face, bristles working across his cheeks, his jaw, his lip, until his face is a mirror of earlier. The razor he strops, briefly, each swipe down the leather sending a pulse down her spine – down – to settle deep in her gut. She wonders if this is what John felt, always, and how he could stand it, and if he would ever admit it.

His fingertips just touching the soft underside of John’s chin, Sherlock guides John left, tilts his head back, guides him and John follows, quiet, throat working against some unspoken need. The first stroke of the blade is quieter than Mary expects, muffled by the shaving foam, and leaves behind a clean stripe on John’s too-thin cheek. Another follows, and another; soon Sherlock turns John’s head the other way, catching the light, until all but the narrow strip above his lip is shaved clean. 

Two fingers, by now, are braced on the hinge of John’s jaw, Sherlock’s thumb reaching all the way to the other side, chin cradled in the broad palm of his hand. She thinks of those long fingers in her, in John: working, stretching, reaching. Her nipples, tucked against her held-tight thighs, are hard, full.

Mary just catches John’s quick nod before Sherlock lifts the razor once more, horizontal, and tilts John’s head back. In the end it only takes three quick swipes, then two back across the grain, to render John sharply clean-shaven once more, and then Sherlock steps back to allow John to rinse his face. He pats it dry with a towel before even glancing at himself in the mirror, but once he does, Mary watches the way his lashes flicker, eyes working, and how he tenses then releases his jaw. Sherlock watches, too; he doesn’t even notice when her gaze falls on him, so hungry is he, she thinks, for the sight of John’s shave-pinked cheeks, the warm flush of his skin, the pleased pucker of his mouth.

John turns to her first, mouth just open, eyes wide and blue in the anaemic fluorescent light. Knees still clutched tight to her chest, she nods. “Thank him, John,” she says, gently; a reason more than an order. John licks his lips. His eyes flicker over her face, and she nods, softly, and brushes her fingertips across the loose line of his knuckles. 

His turn to Sherlock, this time, is shyer, more hesitant. She hears the slide of his tongue, once more, against his nervous lips and sees how his fingers curl against his palm and then unfurl. That open hand – its knuckles still ghost-bruised with a slam against a table, just last night – lifts and curls, once more, around the long pale curve of Sherlock’s neck. He pulls Sherlock down, to him, and now their mouths come together sharply, with little of the hesitant care from before; their kiss just swallows the broken edge of a gasp, from whom she doesn’t know.

Sherlock’s hand flutters to land in the sweat-dampened hair at the nape of John’s neck, dark tarnished gold; John’s shoulders fall, slope, relax; the soft, wet slide of their lips together is all she can hear over the pounding of her veins, the ragged push-pull of her own breath.

She stands. Her hands slot against John’s sides, where his hips are too sharp, and he rocks back into her body, never breaking from Sherlock’s mouth. Pressing a kiss to the back of his neck, just below Sherlock’s hand, she murmurs against his skin something – _yes_ , or _love_ , or _please_ – while her nose brushes against Sherlock’s knuckles. Sherlock doesn’t move away.

Instead, he bends to tuck his mouth against the curve of John’s neck, and she feels as much as hears John’s gasp when Sherlock’s teeth drag over his skin. Sherlock works his mouth against John’s tender skin with assiduous care, as though he’d ached to mark him. John’s every breath presses his body into hers; a familiar warmth fires along her nerves. She trembles and presses her forehead against the back of John’s head. 

At the drag of her lips across his hand, Sherlock looks up, eyes catching hers; his are deep, endless, and his mouth swollen pink. Lifting one hand, she cups the side of his jaw. He flinches, then his eyes flicker closed and he settles against her as she swipes a thumb over his cheekbone. His eyes stay closed a moment after her hand falls away.

So still: the worshipful susurrus of his breath over John’s skin the only real sound in the room. Even John has frozen, tensed inside the uncertain halo of their arms. All at once it is horrible, Sherlock’s unmoved mouth, his flicked-closed eyes, for he should be all passion and light. The man of John’s words, more movement than flesh. She grasps John’s shoulder, turning him, pulling him – momentarily – away from Sherlock’s embrace to press him against the wall.

Sherlock’s hand she lifts, tucks at the edge of John’s unbuttoned collar. Damp, still, and clinging limply to his neck, Sherlock’s fingertips slide underneath, thumb pressing, ever gently, against John’s throat. Mary strokes down his side, under his cardigan, smoothing his shirt where it tucks into his jeans. Drawing in close again, Sherlock kisses John; from here, where she can see the touch of their lips, the way John’s skin whitens at the press of Sherlock’s thumb, Sherlock’s nose smashed against John’s cheeks, she feels overcome, trembling. Her cunt is soaking, her breasts tight, aching, and her fingers flex hard against John’s hip.

Her other hand flutters in the air before she makes a decision and settles it in the small of Sherlock’s back. 

He stills; even through his dressing gown and his shirt she can feel the clamminess of his sweat-cooled skin. She strokes up – down – a few inches of movement only, and presses forward until Sherlock takes a deep swallow and pushes his body against John’s.

John’s gasp is not-quite-swallowed; it echoes off the tile. Sherlock’s hand works under John’s collar, still, so Mary slides her hand between them to work open the top button. When it falls open, Sherlock’s hand stays for a long moment – pale long fingers against John’s tawnier skin – then works hungrily, desperately, on the rest, moving down until he reaches John’s belt. 

The bared strip of skin seems enough for Sherlock’s searching hand, but it won’t be, so Mary tugs John’s shirt from his waistband and, with an awkward twist of her wrist, pulls open the buckle of John’s belt. The metal buckle falls against Sherlock’s thigh; Sherlock groans, ruts up against John, and John’s eyes fly open, find Mary’s over Sherlock’s shoulder. Her mouth is trembling; her cunt aches. 

She works her fingertips just under his waistband, strokes the bare skin there; his eyes flutter shut again. His trust in her swells in her chest, full and hot and bursting. When she flicks open the button of John’s jeans, Sherlock stills against them both, takes a deep, ragged breath against John’s shoulder. 

“C’mon now,” she says, and strokes up his spine. Sherlock’s hand finds hers; their fingertips tangle together as she guides him down, tugging John’s zipper open. Their knuckles drag over John’s cock, hard through the fabric of his pants. John’s head thumps against the wall. His thigh, pressed against Mary’s, trembles. 

“Like that,” she says, to Sherlock’s shaking hand, to John’s ragged breaths. “Like that,” she murmurs to the heated air between them, as Sherlock slips his hand from hers to tug at the waistband of John’s pants. John’s breath comes in great gulping gasps. As Sherlock curls his long-fingered hand around John’s cock, Mary tucks her mouth to John’s bared shoulder, the edge of her teeth on the long line of his collarbone. John’s head lolls, his lips brushing her ear, and she suckles harder, her working mouth in tune with the rasp of skin-on-skin. 

Beside her, Sherlock’s body curls into John, his hip brushing hers; they encircle John, brackets to his gasping statement – a _yes_ , a _god_ , a _love_ – as Sherlock’s mouth finds John’s neck once more. She can feel the jerky movement of Sherlock’s elbow against her side, the slick sweat of John’s skin under her hand at his hip. Under her mouth, his skin blushes crimson. 

John grapples at the wall behind him, searching for purchase, and by the weak curl of his fingers she knows he’s near the edge. Shoving one hand between John and Sherlock, she finds John’s nipple, hard and small against her hot fingertips; Sherlock’s chest presses the back of her hand, two layers of fabric not enough to conceal his own nipple against her knuckles, and she rubs against them both with brusque, clumsy movements as John shoves his hips into Sherlock’s hand and comes. 

It spills through Sherlock’s fingers and over Mary’s hip. Beside her, Sherlock ruts into John; when she rolls her head enough to sneak a look, Sherlock’s mouth has gone slack in the crook of John’s neck, open and shockingly red. The roll of his hips, the sticky patch of John’s come on her skirt, John’s rough, broken breathing in her ear: it’s too much. She pulls up her skirt with one rough hand and shoves her knickers aside; she’s sopping wet, her clit hard against the brusque rasp of her fingertips. 

John gasps against her as Sherlock comes, as she twists hard on his too-sensitive nipple and ruts against her own hand. She comes, finally, achingly, with harsh little cries muffled by John’s shoulder, to fall against his already-limp body. 

Three sets of lungs sound heavy in the too-small room. She’s touching them both, still, her hand between them, her heaving chest matching John’s breath-for-breath, the trembling curve of her thigh finding support in the lean line of Sherlock’s leg. John pets down her arm, fluttering touches; it’s not until he tugs at her wrist that she realizes her hand is still curled around her cunt. She lets him guide it out; he brings it to his mouth and suckles her fingers, tongue working the sensitive little arches between them. As soon as he drops her hand Sherlock’s mouth is on his, once more, pulling her taste back out. Someday she’ll lick herself out of Sherlock’s mouth, she thinks.

She smoothes her damp fingertips over the curve of John’s neck, where a purpling bruise rises. It’ll stay for a few days, she knows, the tender skin worried by John’s every collar, and by her fingers each night, pressing the mark into him so he won’t forget. Reminding him that he can stay brave; that all he wants he can have.


End file.
